Ireland’s greatest obsession is global - a world map of Facebook friendships

A very smart intern on Facebook's data infrastructure engineering team has created a map showing people linked together through the social network site.

Facebook was found to be Ireland's top searched term on Google for 2010 and it's clear from map, with Ireland almost completely white, that the Irish are busy making connections across the world.

Facebook's Paul Butler said it was "interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends”.

The site now has over 500 million active users. Each of those users, on average, has 130. Butler plotted the links so that the cities with the most friendship between them light up. Clearly the eastern side of the United States along with western Europe are the most Facebook obsessed.